Fast outdoor hazy image dehazing based on saturation and brightness

Abstract

Haze usually limits the visibility and reduces the contrast of outdoor images. The removal of haze in a single image has always been a challenging problem. Recently, many methods have been proposed to effectively remove haze in harsh conditions. However, these methods fail to balance the dehazing effect and time consumption. This paper proposes a method based on HSV colour space to restore the visibility of uniform scattering medium. It can prevent the atmospheric light and transmission from being miscalculated. This method uses the brightness component of haze image to estimate the global atmospheric light, which reduces the influence of luminescent objects on atmospheric light estimation. Then, this paper deduces the estimation model of the saturation of scene radiance based on the atmospheric scattering model. In the meantime, according to the advantages and problems of the model, the fast estimation of the transmission is realized by using the stretching function. Finally, this paper solves the parameters in the model by iterative method. Since this method can estimate different media transmission for each pixel, better results can be obtained. The simulation results show that the algorithm is superior to the existing algorithms in terms of dehazing effect and time consumption.